Fidel Castro’s Influence on the Cuban Revolution, 1953-1959
The year was 1953 and Fidel Castro was a dashing and daring reformer that was determined to make a impact in a country that was ruled by an unjust president. With the Movement strong and confident, Castro delivered these strong words to his group of men:
“In a few hours you will be victorious or defeated, but regardless of the outcome – listen well, friends – this Movement will triumph. If you win tomorrow, the aspirations of Martí will be fulfilled sooner. If we fail, our action will nevertheless set an example for the Cuban people, and from the people will arise fresh new men willing to die for Cuba. They will pick up our banner and move forward... The people will back us in
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With no one willing to hear his case, Castro then would realized that his legal arguments would not be effective in his attempts to stop the government led by Batista. Castro needed to achieve his goal through other means, even force if necessary as exemplified by the uprisings in the Caribbean. His alternate approach to achieving his goal was to organize a group of underground rebels who would aid him in his fight against the oppressive rule of Batista. Castro began to draw followers to his cause through his personality, which compelled many people to join him in his fight against Batista. This gathering of followers would culminate with the 26th of July Movement, which in Cuba is called Movimiento 26 de Julio, which is used to commemorate the beginnings of the Cuban Revolution which was led by Fidel Castro. The Cuban Revolution’s conclusion would result in the overthrowing of the dictatorship of Batista, but the movement itself began with a failure. On July 26th, 1953, Fidel Castro led an attack against Fulgencio Batista in the Moncada Barracks. Castro, his brother Raul and a group of 160 armed men would attack the Barracks, which was the second largest military base in Cuba. Based on the fact that the military base was enormous and Castro’s men were far outnumbered in this attack, there was almost no chance that this attack would have succeeded. The outcome of this attack would be sixty of Castro’s men being killed, along with him and his brother being captured
The Cuban government was not ideal for its people at the time, so they decided to initiate a change. Before Castro’s revolution, Cuba’s economy was highly based on tropical fruits, sugar, and tobacco. During this time, the government of Cuba mainly consisted of wealthy land-owning conservatives. Fidel Castro, a strong liberal who thought the Cuban government was corrupt, decided to bring together a band of two-hundred revolutionaries (Carey, Jr. 15). These revolutionaries attacked the Moncada Military barracks on July 26th, 1953 resulting in a failure that earned both Castro and the revolutionaries a ten-year prison sentence. Two years into his sentence, Castro was exiled to Mexico and began to plot another attempt in Mexico City. After many battles with Cuba’s National Army, Castro’s rebels were able to keep Cuba in a state of turmoil while other rebel groups were able to gain control. Through his actions, he was able to gain the support of the Cuban people who thought he was the logical choice for the new leader (Carey, Jr. 15).
In 1950, an opposition movement arose in Cuba. It aimed to overthrow the government which was under the rule of the dictator Fulgencio Batista, who had controlled Cuba since the early 1933’s. The leader of the movement was Fidel Castro. In 1954 Fidel and his brother Raul teamed up
In 1959, Fidel Castro led a group of rebel forces to end and overthrow Fulgencio Batista’s regime in an effort to free the Cuban people from his tyrannous rule. For very many different political reasons this has been portrayed as an act of great injustice and hypocrisy in the modern world. A lot of this has of course been advocated primarily by the US due to the high level of political tension between the two nations that developed in the mid 1950s. Believing this conventional wisdom that Castro was simply an evil communist who oppressed his people and stripped them of their human rights is very dangerous because it
Instead , the people of Cuba started slowly focusing on Fidel Castro, a rebellious leader who strongly opposed Batista, and Lenin, a Russian Communist Revolutionary. Castro traveled to Mexico in 1955, where he met Che Guevarra, who was a very important figure, giving him advice in succesfully defeating Batista.In 1956 Castro returned to Cuba along withhis brother and Che Guevarra . They launched a number of attacks against Batista's forces, however they lost,most of their men being captured. They escaped and hid in the Sierra Maestra Mountain Range, using guerilla war to successfully capture major areas of Cuba, causing Batista to fly to the Dominican Republic in 1959.Lenin, also a strong , rebellious figure in Russia, was exiled prior to the Revolution, focusing his energy on revolutionary politics. He returned to St. Petersburg and began working with other Marxist thinkers. Their ‘work’ attracted some unwanted attention and they were arrested and exiled to Siberia. He returned once more and stepped up, vocalizing his views . His number of supporters soon started increasing , mainly due to the devastating effects the war with Japan and WWI had on Russia’s economy, pushing people of all classes to side with Lenin. The “Bloody Sunday” pushed the Czar to offer several political concessions, most importantly an elected legislative assembly, or Duma. Lenin wasn't pleased, and believed that a
In the 1950’s, tourists visited the island of Cuba for its warm beaches, culture and Spanish colonial architecture. But underneath the surface, was a revolution ready to burst through the Cuban people they just needed the right person to lead them. Cuba at this time was run by a Political Dictator named Fulgencio Batista.
The Cuban Revolution began in 1952 when a former army sergeant named Fulgencio Batista seized power during a contested election. Fulgencio was the elected president of Cuba from 1940 to 1944 and dictator from 1952 to 1959. Another one of Cuba’s important men is Fidel Castro. Castro is a Cuban politician and revolutionary who governed the Republic of Cuba. Fidel and his partner Che Guevara were both in charge of the Cuban Revolution, and made the isolated Moncada Barracks his target. Castro estimated the trip would take 5 days. However, due to engine problems, him and his men arrived late in broad daylight. On the morning of July 23, 1953, Castro made his move, but he needed weapons, and he got them. 138 men attacked the Moncada at dawn, many were captured.
The Communist Revolution of Cuba didn’t just impact the working class, but rather also affected the youth living in Cuba as well. Many children fought in the brigades to avoid capital punishment. One such account tells the story of Jose Agustin, who wrote an autobiography of his experiences in the brigades titled “Diario de brigadista, Cuba 1961”. It was in this book that Jose talked about his daily
In 1956, Fidel Castro and fewer than 100 supporters landed in Cuba to start a rebellion against Batista; by 1958, Castro's July 26th movement was the dominant opposition political group and by late 1958 Castro was firmly in control with Batista fleeing to the Dominican Republic on January 1, 1959 (Suchlicki, 2002). By the mid-1960s, Castro was absolutely in control of the island and his dictatorship was established. There were obstacles along the way: the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of the following year, which remains the closest that the Cold War ever came to igniting into a nuclear superpower conflict and an American embargo of Cuba (Suchlicki,
The CIA initiated the training process by setting up training camps in Guatemala and trained "counter-revolutionary Cubans serving as the armed wing of the Democratic Revolutionary Front, known as Brigade 2506" (The Bay of Pigs Invasion and its Aftermath). Soon, by November the United States had prepared a small army to perform assault landing and guerilla warfare. If the invasion turned out to be a success a former member of Castro's government, José Miró Cardona, was going to take the presidential position of Cuba. However, the plan was already in trouble by October of 1960 when Castro found out about the guerilla training camps that were based in Guatemala. Once John F. Kennedy became president, one of his first decisions in office was authorizing the plan in February of 1961. Although Castro was aware of the United States' intentions, President Kennedy still put in effort to keep the U.S. support disguised. One of the ways he attempted to do this was by assigning The Bay of Pigs as the landing point. "The site was a remote swampy area on the southern coast of Cuba, where a night landing might bring a force ashore against little resistance and help to hide any United States involvement" (The Bay of Pigs). The down side to this was that the Bay of Pigs was 80 miles from refuge in Cuba's Escambray Mountains, giving us an excessive distance which would be a problem if we were faced with an
Fidel Castro and the M-26-7 successfully seized power of Cuba’s government in 1959, after years of fighting. The M-26-7’s nationalist movement was able to knock the corrupt leader, Fulgencio Batista, out of power, and in 1961 Castro deemed the revolution to be officially of a Marxist nature. Throughout his 40-year stay as president, Castro has not allowed his revolution to stall, but rather he has allowed it to progress and adapt as he has seen fit. In relation with Castro’s revolution in Cuba has been another revolution, that of the Cuban women. Castro himself described the changes in women’s public and private lives as "a revolution within a revolution". In a true system of equality, as in the one Castro holds as his ideal, equality
* 1957 May 28, Castro's 26 movement take over an army post in El Uvero.
When Castro and his followers began their mission, Batista's private police and army soon discovered them. The group was then imprisoned in a small island. That did not stop Castro from aiming for his goal. There, he still held meetings, regarding ways of rebelling against Batista. Here was where Castro decided to name his movement, "The Twenty Sixth of July," since that was the first day that Castro and his men went out, in search of their freedom. It was almost like an ascending ladder towards sovereignty.
In March 1952, a Cuban general and politician, Fulgencio Batista, seized power on cuba, proclaimed himself president. Batista canceled the planned presidential elections, and described his new system as "disciplined democracy"; although he gained some popular support, many Cubans saw it as the establishment of a one-man dictatorship. Many opponents of the Batista regime took to armed rebellion in an attempt to oust the government, sparking the Cuban Revolution. One of these groups was the "26th of July Movement" headed by Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz. Consisting of both a civil and a military committee, the former conducted political agitation through an underground newspaper while the latter armed and trained recruits to take violent action against Batista. With Castro as the MR-26-7's head, the organization was based upon a clandestine cell system, with each cell containing ten members, none of whom knew the whereabouts or activities of the other cells. Between December 1956 and 1959, Castro led a guerrilla army against the forces of Batista from his base camp in the Sierra Maestra mountains. The Batista's repression of revolutionaries had earned him widespread unpopularity, and by 1958, his armies were in retreat.
The Cuban revolution was the spark that ignited the flame of communism in Cuba. The developing nation gained independence only as recently as 1898, and was already filled with an atmosphere of distrust and resentment towards the United States. In July of 1953, a revolution began in Cuba between the United States backed President Batista and Fidel Castro. Fidel and his brother Raul Castro lead a series of guerilla warfare battles against the forces of President Batista. “I am Fidel Castro and we have come to liberate Cuba,” stated Fidel Castro. In January of 1959, Fidel Castro became the President of Cuba. With the regime of Fidel Castro, Cuba would fall to communism.
On July 26th, 1953, Fidel Castro led one hundred and twenty nine men and two women in a daring assault against the Moncada army Barracks in Santiago de Cuba to overthrow the government of Fulgencio Batista. Fidel Castro’s plan to overthrow the government of Fulgencio Batista resulted in eight deaths, twelve wounded and more than sixty Cubans were taken prisoner to be tortured and then executed.